I'm glad you have given up cannabis, Paul - maybe you'll think straight now

Paul McCartney, who was a popular singing star many years ago and is for some unfathomable reason treated as if he is a serious person, tells us that he thinks the Monarchy is ‘an amazingly old-fashioned affair’.

In that case, I had better call him Mr McCartney.

For if he thinks kings and queens are outdated, he must feel the same way about knighthoods, not to mention the MBE that he was careful to cite when he so irresponsibly called for cannabis to be legalised back in the old-fashioned Sixties.

Yesterday man: Paul McCartney with his new wife Nancy last week

Mr McCartney is much more outdated than the Monarchy.

I don’t just mean that anyone listening today to the works of The Beatles must be puzzled and embarrassed that such trivial stuff plunged millions of teenage girls into shrieking hysteria.

Iran and Iraq are republics. North Korea is a republic. Republican America searched through more than 200 million citizens for a President and came up with... George W. Bush.

Yet among the small number of the longest-lasting free, law-governed countries in the world, most are monarchies.

This fact would make an adult think.

But like so many children of the Sixties – and children is the right word – Mr McCartney has generally preferred fashionable beliefs to independent thought.

After all, what grown-up, informed person would call for the legalisation of a drug whose users so often end up suffering from incurable mental illness?

The busy, well-funded pro-cannabis lobby will no doubt say that the connection has yet to be definitively proved.

The fact so many cannabis users end up tragically mentally ill, or that mental illness has increased since cannabis use became widespread, is not enough for them.

The tobacco lobby used to spread the same complacent story about cigarettes and lung cancer – in fact, they did so for about 30 wasted years, during which many thousands of people were fooled into thinking that smoking was safe.

By the time they found that it wasn’t, they were already dying in pain in the cancer ward, or ravaged by heart disease and emphysema.

The only good news is that Mr McCartney has announced that he has at last given up smoking cannabis. Why? Not because of our allegedly cruel drug laws, anyway.

Possession of this substance is supposed to be illegal, and Mr McCartney has made no secret of his taste for it, but British police have taken no action against him for 40 years.

So I wonder why he has given up? It is supposed to be because he is worried about the effect on his youngest daughter, Beatrice, aged eight.

But what about his other, older, children? Wasn’t he just as concerned about them?

Whatever the reason, let us hope that, once the greasy fumes of years have cleared away, he realises how much harm he has done by his espousal of this poison and joins the campaign to make it properly illegal again.

There are children now in school, the same age as Beatrice, who may be saved from life in the locked ward of the mental hospital, if he will only recognise that he was wrong..

Arrested in 2007: Blair's aide Ruth Turner

Policing the forces of tyranny

In January 2007, I wrote this about the arrest of Anthony Blair’s aide Ruth Turner in the pursuit of the supposed ‘cash for honours’ scandal: ‘Still, silly people are rejoicing over the arrest of New Labour’s Ruth Turner.

This is wrong, dangerous and short-sighted. Just because this creepy totalitarian method has been used against someone you don’t like, it doesn’t mean it’s right.

What you do to others will eventually be done to you. If you unleash the police as a political weapon, then you have authorised their use against your own side.

‘One day, when you are whimpering amid the wreckage of your ransacked home or having your DNA swabbed and your dabs taken at the behest of your political enemies, you will complain.

'And they will reply, “Where were you when they did this to Ruth Turner?” And they will be right.’

The job of the police is to patrol on foot, preventing crime and disorder.

If they cannot or will not do that, we would be better off without them. Once they attach themselves to political causes – like the current liberal elite campaign against press independence – they are a monstrous engine of tyranny.

And today in Dictionary Corner... Trevor Phillips

Trevor Phillips, chief commissar of our embryo Thought Police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, says Christianity is fine in church, but not if its beliefs conflict with the stern will of the liberal state.

He says those who want Britain to stay Christian are like Muslims who want sharia law.

That’s what he means by ‘equality’. The ancient religion of this country on which its laws and freedoms are based is now ‘equal’ with Islam.

Trevor Phillips says those who want Britain to stay Christian are like Muslims who want sharia law

What hope for our children's children?

How do civilisations end? Once, merciless hordes of barbarians would ride into peaceful, prosperous valleys whose inhabitants had gone soft.

Now, we do not need to wait for the barbarians. We are so busy enjoying ourselves that we cannot even pass on the basics of civilisation to the next generation.

Teachers report that children arrive at school aged five, still wearing nappies and unable to speak properly. They come from prosperous homes filled with gadgets and – of course – TV sets.

I first warned of this back in 1996, when the long, mad, ultra-feminist campaign to persuade women that bringing up their own children was demeaning and unworthy of them had finally succeeded.

By Christmas 1997, Britain’s female workforce outnumbered the male workforce for the first time.

This wasn’t because everyone suddenly agreed with loopy old trouts like Betty Friedan, or anti-marriage fanatics such as Germaine Greer – but because big employers realised that women were much easier to exploit than men.

So off they all marched to work in call centres or banks or human-rights law firms, and their babies were left to whimper in day orphanages and dumped drooling in front of TV screens.

Year by year, we pay a higher price for this. What sort of children will these children have?

'Most useless of Tories': David Willetts

Where there's a Willetts...

Nothing succeeds like failure.

Turning British secondary schools into comprehensives was an educational and social disaster almost without parallel.

So now we have decided to do the same thing to our universities.

Equality of outcome is to replace equality of opportunity, and politics is to override education.

Professor Les Ebdon, friend of the Mickey Mouse degree, is to be appointed to help achieve this aim.

Can we please stop pretending that this act of national suicide is the responsibility of Liberal Democrat Vince Cable alone?